Bed stiffeners are often used under a mattress to provide a stiffer sleeping surface to avoid back problems. A stiffener of a size such as 3 feet by 2 feet is often sufficient. Such a board is unwieldy to carry, and there have been attempts to provide boards that can be folded or slid to a compact stowed state for transport and then to a deployed state for use. A bed stiffener assembly which, in its stowed configuration, had a width of about 1 foot and length of about 2 feet in the stowed configuration would be reasonably easy to carry under one arm. This suggests a stiffener with three sections or boards that can lie facewise against one another in the stowed configuration.
One approach, described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,885,695 by Feezel suggests the use of a wide middle board and narrower end boards that may be half as wide as the middle board and which can each fold against the rear face of the middle board. This has the disadvantage that, even though three boards are used, the stowed apparatus has a width only one half that of the deployed apparatus, instead of about one third as much. It would be possible to use three hinged boards, with one end board pivoting against the rear face of the middle board and the other end pivoting against the front face of the middle board, but special precautions would have to be taken to prevent upward pivoting of the second end board in the deployed position of the apparatus. A bed stiffener of relatively simple construction, which could be folded into a compact configuration for holding under a person's arm, or storage on a hotel maid's cart, and which could be simply and rapidly moved to a deployed configuration wherein it could stiffen a mattress, would be of considerable value.